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Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

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Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#61

Post by snuxoll »

executesorder66 wrote: post #53
forgettableuser wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a in-depth article from Vanity Fair from 2012, "Microsoft’s Lost Decade" which tries to put together what happened. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lo... Some excerpts: By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse a…

>no more using C# So what did they use instead? C++ ?

> So what did they use instead? C++ ?

Yes, that's pretty much what the bulk of everything that comes with Windows is written in.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#62

Post by rasz_pl »

cyanbane wrote: post #36

Could this be one of the most expensive software development failures of all time? Is MS putting money on top of that to show how much of a failure it was and how they decided to deal with it? At a minimum, just letting the story be told from the grave to allow for people to look out for similar things in other projects? Interesting I think. I don't know of many companies who allow/support documentation of a failure…

OS/2 was couple of billion dollars.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#63

Post by snuxoll »

graiz wrote: post #10
untog wrote: post #5

This is really fascinating, though I have no idea why. That said, I'd love to read a series of articles about the development of Longhorn and why it failed rather than a tech dive into the components developed. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Raymond Chen writes a great blog called the OldNewThing that has some good stories. I think asking why it failed is rather hard to explain and I suspect different people who were on the project would have different explanations. I worked on XP and a little bit of Longhorn. In my opinion one of the reasons was that much of the product direction and leadership shifted. The MSN app team merged with the shell team after…

JoeB? That wouldn't happen to be Joe Belfiore by any chance, would it?

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#65

Post by speeder »

ajdlinux wrote: post #11
unsignedqword wrote: post #8

Vista was not a very well-received release, but I remember using 64-bit Vista way back when. Maybe my memory is failing me a little, but I don't really recall Vista being that bad or unstable. UAC, of course, was a little annoying then, but 7 felt a little more unstable and crash-prone than Vista. My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for h…

If my memory serves me correctly, a lot of the public outrage at the time was about poor drivers for some time after release?

Some stuff vista broke were never fixed even...

1. Vista disabled parallel ports direct access, new cnc machines, or people using old printers and scanners still use xp.

2. Vista removed support for directx before dx10... Microsoft realized later how shitty idea that was, but instead added dx9 and below emulation layer. The problem is that it only works almost 100% right on win 7, thus why many gamers still use it ( instead of 8+ where some good games are very buggy or slow )

3. Vista audio model disallowed drivers to do anything that could be used to disable hdmi drm. As side effect all 3d sound cards stopped working properly. Lots of people blamed Creative and other sound card makers, that got generally screwed... now that this tech proved to be essential for vr gpu companies are doing workarounds, for example AMD has as selling point of TruAudio that it skips Windows normal audio stack.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#66

Post by mjevans »

WalterGR wrote: post #50
orionblastar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS http://superuser.com/questions/11346/what-happened-to-winfs Apparently it was canceled and part of it was added to Microsoft SQL-Server 2008, and Windows 7 and other software. I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. It is why Microsoft bought out Skydrive renamed as Onedrive.

I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. How so? The point of WinFS was to store an object graph representing your data in a DB. It was more or less antithetical to files. (Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)

'the cloud' is associated with tagging type metadata and searching descriptions; I think that's what is being referenced.

The actual implementation of storing and searching also becomes someone else's problem. In a way it's just another slosh back and forth in the cycle of centralization and de-centralization of processing/storage.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#68

Post by breakingcups »

carlesfe wrote: post #60
cpeterso wrote: post #52

I have some screenshots from 1998 of Microsoft's "Neptune" project, a prototype of a task-based GUI to replace the Windows 95-style GUI. I keep meaning to publish these screenshots online for historical reference..

Well now I'm curious, please upload them to imgur :)

IIRC, Neptune was basically XP's Longhorn. It was designed to be the new consumer version of windows, a successor to Windows 98. Built on Windows 2000, it had quite a few new features that were new to consumers. However, the relevant work was eventually merged with the new business version of Windows to form what would become Windows XP.

There's plenty of screenshots you can already find online, you can even find ISO's for build 5111 and run it in a VM yourself.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#69

Post by jug »

frik wrote: post #38
maslam wrote: post #30

I have vivid memories of working on Longhorn as an intern. It was an incredibly ambitious project - rewrite of the "filesystem" (really, a relational object store!), driver framework and display stack to name a few. The project failed the same exact way many projects fail - they are too ambitious and not well-scoped. The demo Hillel showed, IIRC, was complete vaporware.

WinFS wasn't a filesystem, but implemented upon NTFS as filesystem filter driver and dotNet based service, the files were stored in a hidden directory (SQL Server Compact and raw files with generated filenames in sub folders). The dotNet service was just very slow. The original vision of "information at your fingertip" was behind the Cairo project. And Cairo had an object stored in the NTFS filesystem driver. WinNT4…

I think Longhorn was in large where we have now finally got with Windows 8 and onwards (not 7). An OS with core apps written in .NET, an object oriented data management system in Powershell. PS unites e.g Windows Registry and common files under the same umbrella. Windows 10 also completes the vision of a shared OS for all appliances.

Unfprtunately I think it took MS too long to get here. Other vendors got to the home appliances part before them, which is mind boggling given the traction MS had once upon a time.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#70

Post by matthewmacleod »

smegel wrote: post #28

> The project, however, failed completely and development had to reset. More than three years late Microsoft released Windows Code Name 'Longhorn' as Windows Vista... ...the project, however, failed completely...

It did fail completely. Microsoft started from scratch, using the same codename.
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